COMMENT #1: Hi Martin, corn also turned nicely on the ECM:
JB
COMMENT #2: Hello Marty, I just want to point out that the Japanese yen broke really hard on the 10th. Not sure if this will prove to be a precursor of what is to come.
Thanks from Tokyo, your old home ground.
AS
COMMENT #3: Well the ECM also marked the reversal in trend in the 30-year bond. It peaked at 134 and fell to 130 by the end of the week. That was just remarkable.
Colin
COMMENT #4: Martin; is this chart real that people are sending around claiming it was Benner’s work?
Mat
ANSWER: As far as this chart of Brenner’s Cycle being real, the answer is no Someone has made it up and signed his name. They have at least extended his cycle correctly. The last time someone tried that they skewed the cycle to make it look like it forecast the Depression 1932 low.
When the WSJ published it, it showed 1932 instead of 1931. Brenner did not extend this out in this manner. What is important to understand is that Brenner was a farmer and farmers understand the cycles in nature. Economists and governments pretend they can smooth out the cycle and eliminate the booms and busts.
The business cycle always wins as both former chairmen of the Federal Reserve conceded – Arthur Burns and Paul Volcker.
Back during the 19th century when Brenner was observing the business cycle, it was still based on commodities. Kondratieff took the same data. I believe the reason WHY the Economic Confidence Model has been so accurate is that it was based on a list of Panics – not one sector of the economy. Therefore, the ECM incorporates weather as Brenner and Kondratieff did by using the commodity sector. Yet just that the ECM was derived from financial panics, it was not based on any one specific type so it strangely seems to have incorporated the whole gambit.
Furthermore, all previous cyclical analysis was based on just a single market like stocks. They have failed because they could not account for the external influence of a contagion. The fact that this list began with the Turks’ siege of Vienna, means that the list was also influenced by war and from an international perspective.
This is a fascinating subject that I will explore in far more detail in my coming book.
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, You are renowned for your sources. You said the IMF was planning to replace the dollar with its own international digital currency. You targeted Ukraine a year before anyone heard of the country. You said Ukraine was losing the war and they had lost 100,000 troops when people said that was Russian propaganda. That turned out to be classified as Ukrainian information. These Pentagon papers confirm everything you have said a year ago. Israel was reluctant to send anything to Ukraine when everyone said Zelensky was Jewish. The list goes on and on.
My question is, why do you have information from around the world before anyone else?
HP
ANSWER: That is hard to say. I think what has emerged over the decades is that people are sharing information from all over to get a true picture of what is honestly happening. People come to me because I put out the truth. Back when they were forming the Euro, it has come out that the Bundesbank was against it. They were providing all the notes and discussions going on because they also know we have the largest institutional audience of anyone. It is never my opinion. Everyone has opinions and that means nothing. We are well read because it is not my personal opinion. I really cannot address this subject any more than that.
Posted originally on the CTH on April 14, 2023 | Sundance
Always keep in mind that retails sales from the Dept of Commerce [DATA HERE pdf] are always calculated in dollars. Inflation can artificially skewer retail sales if prices increase, and yet consumer purchases decline at a rate lower than the increase in price. Fewer units sold at higher prices can give the false impression of increased sales.
During an inflationary environment, when prices increase yet retail sales drop, there are substantially fewer units being purchased. Overall purchases at stores, restaurants and online declined a seasonally adjusted 1% in March from the prior month.
During the time measured gasoline was less expensive, so that led the drop in fuel sales; however, drops in dept stores (-2.5%), General Merchandise (-3.0%), electronics (-2.1%), and building supplies (-2.1%), shows another broad-based pullback of Main Street consumer spending. (pdf here)
These outcomes are in general alignment with what many people have shared via regional ground reports. Grocery store sales are flat despite major increases in grocery store prices (+10 to +20%). People are buying fewer grocery store units and making their food budget stretch as far as possible.
Durable goods are not considered essential, and sales of cars, electronics and department store products are much lower.
I am actually a little (pleasantly) surprised to see restaurant sales holding (+0.1%), despite the massive increase in fresh food costs. I thought people would eat out less, but the total decline in restaurant foot traffic seems to be in the single digits. I guess people can afford it more than I anticipated.
(Via Wall Street Journal) – […] The retail-sales report mainly captures spending on goods rather than most services such as travel, rent and utilities, offering only a partial picture of spending. The Commerce Department will release more complete figures later this month.
Spending on air travel was robust in March but outlays on other services like hotels declined, transaction data from Bank of America credit and debit cards showed. And the cost of shelter has increased faster than the overall rate of inflation, federal data show.
Some Americans have had to make adjustments to allow them to keep spending.
Recent data suggest many consumers are more cautious about purchases of goods they often have to borrow money to buy. In March, spending declined in big-ticket categories including vehicle sales, electronics, furniture, and at home-improvement and department stores.
“The current challenges in the used auto industry are well documented,” CarMax Inc. Chief Executive Bill Nash said on a call with analysts this week, “with affordability pressured by broad inflation, climbing interest rates, tightening lending standards and prolonged low consumer confidence.” (more)
COMMENT: Well, the goldbugs are wrong again. This claim that the stock market must crash and only gold will rise is as you say sophistry. It looks like gold and the Dow are rallying together. I can see how they are just promoting a cult-like agenda.
Thanks for being objective
MH
REPLY: We became the biggest institutional adviser because there was never an agenda. Everything goes up, and everything comes down. There is an old saying among actual traders – NEVER marry the trade. I buy gold personally. I just bought a hoard of $20 gold pieces all uncirculated and all dated 1924. I do not regard it as a trade, just a stash for the long-term. It will go up and go down. Do not pretend that something only goes in one direction.
Here is a chart from Socrates on the Quarterly Level of the Dow/Gold Ratio. Anyone who only forecasts a single direction is NOT an analyst – they are a promoter like a used car salesman. No matter what we look at, there is a time to buy and a time to sell. EVERY market functions that was.
Here is an advertisement from April 9th, 1930 pitching Bank Stocks. Brokers were telling people to buy all the way down, average in, but it took 26 years for the Dow to reach the 1929 high again. Anyone selling any product will ALWAYS tell you to BUY. That is their business. It is up to you to come to terms with how ALL markets really move. Hence, there is always a TIME TO BUY just as there is a TIME TO SELL.
Have you come across a period in history that at the end of the sixth wave, after the political system dies, during the next six waves, human mankind learned from its past errors and corrected it?
ANSWER: Actually, the answer is NO. The fall of the Minoan Civilization brought in a dark age with the invasion of the Sea Peoples from the North who were driven south by climate and conquered all the civilizations during the Bronze Age except for Egypt. Reliefs show the Egyptians in heated battles against the Sea Peoples.
Everything in this universe is fractal. It is a repetitive pattern of self-referral. You have children and they are a blend of both parents’ DNA – self-referral. Thus, what makes 2032 extremely important, is that it is the Sixth Wave since the last upheaval of the overthrow of the Monarchy.
The Roman Empire peaked with the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180AD). We know from Chinese documents that he had even sent an ambassador to China which was the first contact.
However, 6 of the 51.6 waves (which are 6 of the 8.6-year) in turn build in a fractal manner into a 309.6-year wave and then we have 6 waves of that which form 1857.6. There are then 6 waves of that building into 11,145.6-year waves. About 11,600 years ago (9,600 BC) was an abrupt period of global warming which accelerated the glacial retreat that was the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch. That is when we begin to find the domestication of sheep and evidence of settlements such as Jericho dating back to 9,600 BC. That wave was the Mesolithic era which refers to the final period of hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and Western Asia. This was between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the Neolithic Revolution. This is also why in back-testing the ECM, it became very clear that it incorporates nature and the swings back and forth on climate change.
There is the period of the Megalithic Monuments in Europe. We do not know why these Neolithic and Copper Age creators were motivated to expend such energy in their creation. Some of these structures appear to have been graves. The sheer weight of the stones shows a very determined culture whose motives are lost to the haze of the period we refer to as prehistory.
Recent studies have implied that these megalithic monuments across Europe originated in northwest France, and the practice of building them spread along the continent’s coastlines in several migratory waves. They first appeared during the second half of the fifth millennium BC. That was about 4300 years before the invention of coinage.
The oldest known city dates back to 6700BC, Catal Huyuk, located in modern Turkey. I have studied the economy of this period. It has all the trappings of modern-day civilization. There are houses with murals on the walls. This confirmed that there was an artist trade. There were a lot of female deities found so there was some artistic trade that carved these out of marble as well as clay. There was no indication of money being used so it was most likely a barter-based society with some people making tools and others growing crops.
Food was money in the shape of olives, dates, seeds, or animals and we also know that financing, lending for interest, dates back to c. 5000 BC, if not even earlier. The fall of Rome prompted the return of the Sin of Usury – denial of interest. Much of the blame for the fall of Rome was attributed to corruption of that sort. Capitalism is born with the Protestant Reformation which allowed Christians to earn money from interest. Martin Luther was funded by Christians who wanted to get into the banking field which had been restricted to the Jews.
What we do see at these events is typically it is a knee-jerk reaction to whatever was in place, the reaction is in the opposite direction. We have gone through a revolution against Monarchy. That led to Republicanism. This time perhaps we move toward Democracy. We should have the right to vote – do we go to war – Yes or No! Some Neocons should not make that decision and then we are imprisoned and called a traitor if you do not die on some battlefield that they decide should take place. This is not any different than Monarchy where King Louis XIV (1643-1715) lamented on his deathbed – “I have been too fond of war.” These people play a sport with the common people as the pawns on the chessboard.
Back in 2015, I addressed the concern then of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk who were worried about what might happen as a result of advancements in Artificial Intelligence. They’re concerned that robots could grow so intelligent that they could independently decide to exterminate humans. Today, it has only gotten worse with GPT-4 open for everyone to try. In doing so, they are training the computer and expanding its knowledge base. Musk, with a gaggle of others, have penned a letter calling for a “pause” in AI development.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”
I have tinkered with AI since the early 1970s. There is no doubt these guys are influenced by concepts like in the movies Terminator and the Matrix. But from a real-world programming side, to outdo human thinking is easy. A computer model can far surpass humans in so many ways. What we have done in finance is unparalleled, but the key here in our system was to ELIMINATE human emotion. Only in that matter has Socrates been able to beat human judgment which is always flawed.
We could create an AI that is better than any medical doctor for there to it is offering only an “opinion” which is not always correct. A computer that had the full database of diseases could sort out things in the blink of an eye. Indeed, I contracted a parasite that went into my left eye. I could feel it. The doctor would not listen, He sent me to some specialist for something else and I told him what the issue was. Only because the same thing happened to him, he called my doctor and said this guy has a parasite. He then sent me to an infectious disease specialist who in just 1 minute looked at my blood work and said yes, you have a parasite. To this day, I have lost some vision in my left eye because nobody would listen. If they never experienced it, they would not even think about it. A computer would not make that human mistake.
What these guys are talking about is what I would call an open-ended AI system meaning it has no actual purpose. That is a black box and allowing a computer to develop into areas nobody has even thought about, could pose a danger more on the lines of the MATRIX or Terminator. They wrote in their letter:
“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous
race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.”
I am pretty good at programming. This is all conceptual design. In the case of Socrates, it is confined to the financial markets. It is not going to surf the web in search of the answer to what is the name of Lady GaGa’s dog. Socrates will not discover the cure for cancer. It does not have a medical database. The type of AI that they are talking about is limitless machine learning that can write its own code and go in directions that nobody thought about. Let’s start with a description of the actual real-use-case problem. Why would you even need such a program to go in directions that a human could not even imagine?
The government does not want independent thought – they do not even want intelligent police for the same reason Stalin kill intellectuals. The government wants a mindless and emotionless drone. They want robot police and robot army who follow orders and will never hesitate. As I have stated, when the police and military no longer follow orders and side with the people, then revolutions take place. Those in power know that. Hence, they want robots who will control the mob, kill us when ordered, and for that, they do not need full unlimited AI that could also turn on the government.
The AI that is now unfolding with no direction and just letting it go and seeing what develops may be interesting for a lab experiment. But we must respect that there MUST be limitations. Socrates has beaten everyone, including me. But it is confined to this field. It has a purpose and no design would have ever allowed it to go off and explore other fields. There was no rationale to create such an open-ended machine learning system. It’s confined to the world economy, capital flows, weather, and geopolitical developments.
Politics has no place in science. I mentioned the publication Nature in my article on Fauci’s failed door to door vaccine campaign, and how it claimed that incentivizing vaccinations did not have negative consequences. I am already skeptical about most scientific studies since I always follow the money. A reader pointed out that Nature, like so many other “science” publications, has been compromised by the left.
Nature publicly endorsed Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign and produced a three-part series on why. The publication repeatedly bashed Trump during his candidacy, with one article alone calling him a racist, xenophobe, white supremacist, womanizer, who was pushing the US into a nuclear war. That certainly does not sound like unbiased science. It is an opinion that is unfounded. Their largest criticism was how his administration handled the pandemic. “Joe Biden must be given an opportunity to restore trust in truth, in evidence, in science and in other institutions of democracy, heal a divided nation, and begin the urgent task of rebuilding the United States’ reputation in the world,” the October 14, 2020 article stated. The article continued:
“No US president in recent history has so relentlessly attacked and undermined so many valuable institutions, from science agencies to the media, the courts, the Department of Justice — and even the electoral system. Trump claims to put ‘America First’. But in his response to the pandemic, Trump has put himself first, not America.
His administration has picked fights with the country’s long-standing friends and allies, and walked away from crucial international scientific and environmental agreements and organizations: notably, the 2015 Paris climate accord; the Iran nuclear deal; the United Nations’ science and education agency UNESCO; and even, unthinkable in the middle of a pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO).”
So it supports all the major health organizations fighting to remove our freedoms. Nature failed to mention that scientists rely on grants for funding, and those grants are provided by organizations that expect a specific outcome from their studies. Stanford economist Floyd Zhang published a study on March 20, 2023, claiming that Nature’s endorsement of Biden caused Trump supporters to distrust “the science.”
“The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters' trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters' trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump. These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.”
Scientific studies are now propaganda tools that are used to push forth a certain agenda. We must question everything. If you follow the money, you can usually see where an organization’s loyalty lies.
To Check out the video click here to view my most recent interview with Outer Limits: “The Perfect Storm.”
Commentary from Ryan McCormick:
Legendary economic forecaster and pro-freedom advocate Martin Armstrong once again appears on the Outer Limits of Inner Truth Podcast to discuss: The neoconservative agenda and the likelihood for war with Russia, Political corruption in Ukraine and the impact on global perception of the United States, And why the 2023 Financial Crisis is colliding with important cyclical targets regarding war, which may result in a two-prong panic of unprecedented significance. Marin also shares his perspective on Alan Turing's groundbreaking work on the mathematical order behind Morphogenesis and offers an updated outlook on how the US will breakup.
Economics is the ONLY field where cycles are denied. Moreover, people do not even comprehend how COMPLEXITY emerges. Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who is probably the father of computers for he built the really first computer to break the German Enigma Machine. The man was Alan Turing. He invented the computer and broke the German Enigma Code. You can watch the movie The Imitation Game to get a general idea of his achievement.
But Turing did something even far more astonishing. He had a theory that within nature, what appears to be chaos was just a mask that hides a natural order. He was the first to think that there might be a mathematical order that defines nature. There is a mysterious aspect of Morphogenesis. All the cells in an embryo are identical. Then the cells begin to clump together and actually become different from each other. The mystery was how identical cells know to form different things such as skin, eyes, brain, or bone. There is no central command center.
The phenomenon of Morphogenesis is what is the essence of mystery. This process becomes self-organization. Before Turning, absolutely nobody had any idea of how this process even worked. It was also a great mystery of life itself. It was Turning who published on March 15th, 1952, the Ides of March 3.14, his mathematical explanation of Morphogenesis. Turning’s formula was revealing for it uncovered a secret order behind the mask of chaos. Despite being one of the most brilliant minds ever and all his contributions even breaking the German code, because he was a homosexual, a judge order him to prison or subject him to hormone injections to cure him. He committed suicide on June 7th, 1954 because of the abuse of the government which ignored all his contributions.
What Turning discovered in nature, was that there is a hidden order in which identical cells then change and become specific parts of the end result without any specific coding. What would appear to be simplistic formulas, suddenly emerged into a complexity that baffled the human mind. This is what I discovered in economics. A secret cycle that defines the complexity which we also cannot see with the naked eye.
This is why different cycles unfold in all the sectors such as metals, commodities, share markets, currency, bonds, etc, and when they align that is when we get the superposition events. I will explain more in my forthcoming book on the Economic Confidence Model. One bubble will be in the real estate markets, such as 1792 and 2007-2009. Other bubbles took place in commodities such as in 1919. Still, others took place in currency markets and capital concentration such as the 1989 peak in the Nikkei in Japan or the 1929 bubble in the USA.
In 2020, we warned that this cycle would be a debt crisis wave, but also a commodity wave with rising inflation and interest rates into 2024. We must understand that each bubble is different for it all depends upon the cyclical aspect of that particular sector and does that line up with others to produce a super-wave that becomes the bubble.
Right now, we have a crisis in banking because far too many banks have just listened to the mainstream media and failed to understand that interest rates would be rising – not declining. Since 2020 we have been warning that interest rates were at a 5,000-year low. A simple bounce to just 5% would be devastating. Many banks attend our conferences because they are sophisticated and do not make hedging decisions based on the latest headline on MSNBC.
I am working hard on having Socrates articulate the complexity. I hope to roll this out this year – ASAP. My personal interpretation is generally on point, but not always. What looked to be dominated by geopolitical events in April, appears to be combined with the banking crisis, and in all honestly, I could not imagine that the FDIC even considered not covering 85% of the deposits. I should not have had to even explain that doing that would mean that small businesses have systemic risk in all banks. I actually had to explain there would be a major banking crisis in April that would make the Great Depression appear like a dress rehearsal.
As such, this banking crisis does not appear to be finished. It will still move into April 10th or so. Then the ICC issued a criminal indictment for Putin when they have no such jurisdiction by their own authority. They have become yet another political tool of the Neocons determined to create World War III.
We have entered the period of COMPLEXITY where we are not looking at a single sector in a bubble. We are looking at a really dangerous contagion of COMPLEXITY and the Neocons could care less about the economics. They have control of the White House and this is their chance and they are NOT backing down.
QUESTION: If the metals are not trading at a fair value relative to everything else, then does that not prove they are manipulated?
SN
ANSWER: Your problem is the assumption that everything must be trading at some fair value. That is up there with the theory of random walks. ALL markets trade for periods where they remain well below fair value. That was the entire takeover boom of the 1980s which they also blamed on me because I was advising many of the takeover players. I simply showed these charts back then which show in terms of book value, the Dow Jones bottomed in 1977. The market was grossly undervalued because you could buy a company, sell all its tangible assets, and double or triple your money. Michael Douglas’ famous speech in that movie about “greed” would not even be possible if everything always trade like some mythical robot at fair value. Everything overshoots and undershoots.
The metals are NO DIFFERENT. Every market swings between grossly UNDERVALUED and then grossly OVERVALUED. This is part of the business cycle. If there were no periods of gross undervaluations, there would not be a sudden boom either.
This is what you have to come to grips with. There is such a thing and the business cycle. Our cyclical analysis would not be possible if everything was trading at a flat line of fair value. This nonsense in metals is made up of people who have been wrong, and need to blame someone else. It is like blaming climate cycles on CO2. This notion of fair value is rooted, I hate to tell you, in Marxism, because he too did not understand the business cycle.
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Centinel2012 